Sign of the Times
Hate Has No Home Here Project Benefits Project Worthmore, Colorado ACLU
By Cara DeGette, Editor, GPHN
It started as a simple post on the Park Hill Neighborhood Facebook page. To say it took off was an understatement.
“The original Facebook post asked if any neighbors would be interested in a yard sign that says Hate Has No Home Here’ in English, Urdu, Arabic, Korean, Hebrew and Spanish,” noted co-organizer Margaret Fogerty. “Within an hour more than 200 people indicated interest, so a couple of neighbors got to work organizing a Go Fund Me page to raise funds and place the yard sign order.”
In one day, $4,000 was raised to cover the cost of printing 500 signs and metal stakes. As of press time, another 150 signs have been printed and distributed in Park Hill and surrounding neighborhoods. $1,000 in donations was raised, with 25 percent going to the Colorado ACLU and 75 percent to Project Worthmore, a local nonprofit that helps refugees who are settling in Denver and Aurora.
“As soon as I saw the sign, I thought, ‘I want one of those,’ ” said Sara Visser, who, accompanied by her young daughter Nina, picked a sign up from Oblio’s Pizza on Feb. 12. “In these times in particular, it’s just so important that my daughter understands the message. It just needs to be said, over and over, and over again.”
The signs actually originated in a Chicago suburb back in November. A third-grader came up with the message in the midst of the polarizing election campaign. Now, the Hate Has No Home Here project has blossomed into a national movement to promote just and inclusive communities … “by encouraging neighbors to declare their homes, schools, businesses, and places of worship to be safe places where everyone is welcome and valued.”
Thousands of signs have been printed and distributed, not just in Denver and Chicago, but in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, Texas and Arizona and far beyond the U.S. borders, including Sweden and Equador.
Not everyone has taken the message to heart. Several Park Hill residents displaying the signs subsequently reported being accosted by a man who, going door-to-door, warned that refugees would commit violent acts. In a letter to the editor that appears in this issue, another Park Hillian, who supported Donald Trump in the election, took exception to any suggestion that he promotes hate – and noted his own yard sign was vandalized during the fall campaign.
For more about the Hate Has No Home Here project, check out hatehasnohome-here.wordpress.com. For more on Project Worthmore, check out https://www.projectworthmore.org. For more on the work being done by the ACLU of Colorado, check out http://aclu-co.org.